Located roughly mid-way between New York City and Philadelphia, the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area is a verdant, mountainous oasis cut by a cooling river that attracts millions every year, with most coming during the summer months to relax and gain a bit of respite from the region's notorious humidity. Those millions, though, can be oppressive when squeezed too closely together.

You could call it the "Rise of the Amphibians," but at Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area it's simply a seasonal event: the rise of spotted salamanders, newts, and other critters that are in an amorous mood and on the move.

When it was built this million-dollar outhouse created all kinds of publicity for the National Park Service...for its price. How'd it get so expensive? Slate brought in from Vermont. Seven-hundred dollars worth of seed for landscaping. A porch for getting in out of the rain, or sunshine. And the design and construction.

More than 350 acres have been added to Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area in Pennsylvania and New Jersey as partial mitigation for expansion of a transmission corridor across the NRA, the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, and the Middle Delaware National Scenic and Recreational River.

Winter wonderlands come in many shapes, forms, and temperatures in the National Park System. They can be pine forests shrouded in snow, or turquoise waters swimming with green parrotfish, blue tangs, and silvery barracudas. You can climb ice walls at Acadia National Park, kick-and-glide or skate to an overlook of Half Dome and the Yosemite Valley, or find your way to the 13,159-foot summit of Wheeler Peak atop Great Basin National Park.

Much has been written in recent years about the disconnect between the current generation of young people and the natural world, along with concerns that national parks are not seen as relevant by Americans from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Both issues aren't helped when field trips to parks and other off-site areas are often among the first casualties of tight school budgets. One solution is being provided by the National Park Foundation's "Ticket to Ride" grant program.

Impacts of climate change on the National Park System are such that it is "no longer ecologically viable to manage resources solely within park boundaries," according to a study that found parks "are overwhelmingly at the extreme warm end of historical temperature distributions..."

Straddling the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border, Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area is a 70,000-acre swath of forests cut by a river, with tributaries flowing in throughout the parkscape. It offers a quick and easy escape from urban areas of the metropolitan New York-New Jersey, as well as from the Philadelphia area.